Historic Hood River
“Frank Davenport’s Box Factory”
10-31-2025
Notes
This image is captioned “Frank Davenport’s Box Factory at Ruthton, 1895.” Presumably they are making fruit crates. I’ve adjusted the exposure a bit so you can better see what’s going on inside. There’s a nice saw blade in the back, and planer in the foreground. There’s a boy holding a stack of box planks near the rear door.
While today’s mills do their best to extract the largest lumber possible from small trees, this factory seems to have the opposite problem. They just need small thin planks but they’re starting with such big long pieces of timber.
The prominent pile of horse poop in the foreground reminds us the horse and buggy age wasn’t quite as charming as we often imagine it.
kmb
I wonder how many different box factories there may have been in the HR area at the time? W.J. Smith owned a box factory that was built in 1894. Both Captain Dukes and his son, Maltie Dukes, worked there. Captain Dukes suffered an eye injury at the factory in 1895 (Ref. HR Glacier, Sep 13, 1895). Maltie Dukes suffered a hand injury at the factory in 1897, and had his little finger amputated (Ref. HR Glacier, Oct 01, 1897). Life was definitely riskier back in those earlier days.
L. E.
Frank Davenport’s daughter Hazel and her husband Clarence Lewis lived in my community of Glenwood. They were not involved with saw mills. They were farmers.
But, we do have a Mill Pond here in our community. It is all that is left of the Harris brothers Milton Box Company sawmill. The Harris brothers were from Milton Freewater, and went into the business of building fruit boxes for the growing number of orchards in the Walla Walla/Pendleton area .
They cut down big, beautiful Klickitat County pine trees, sawed it into lumber, then by team and wagon, or truck, hauled the lumber to an antiquated railroad which eventually met up with the railroad along the Columbia River. The lumber then traveled to Milton Box Company where the lumber from big beautiful pine trees was made into fruit boxes.
However….this post did get me to thinking about the fruit boxes. I still have some prune boxes from when my grandpa had a prune orchard. Those boxes are made of heavy boards with cut out handles. After grandpa took out the prune orchard those boxes were used for numerous odd jobs. Heavy duty odd jobs.
They have remained sturdy and I just realized they are just over 100 years old.
They are not built like the light weight boxes of today.
Jeffrey Bryant
My grandfather, John Couch, grew up in Zillah, Washington. Prior to going to college he worked making fruit boxes. He told me that when he went in for his physical prior to school the doctor told him he was deformed, because his right forearm was much larger than his left. This was from nailing all of those boxes.